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This article proves once again that the meal assembly business just doesn’t work and that when times get tough people will drop this service in the blink of an eye. People are a fickle lot and if spend all your time trying to cater to every need you’ll never accomplish anything.

“The concept is still needed and the survivors are starting to do better as the economy turns around,” Vermeulen says. Been saying that for 3 years now I think it’s time to give up on this mantra. This is a dead industry and you’d have better odds making money through gambling than off a meal prep kitchen.

Gas prices have pretty much gotten out of control. I thought things were bad when we crept up to $3.00 a gallon and now we’ve crushed that threshold and are rushing headlong into $4.00 a gallon. And I’m not so sure that’s the cap. With all the international trouble and a slew of other factors I think $4 will just be the beginning of our troubles. And of course that means food prices are going to go through the roof. The grocery bill has doubled in the past couple of years and it looks like it may do it again this summer.

Summer is a horrible time for the food industry anyway so this will just make it even worse. And it won’t just be restaurants it will be all of us. I don’t think there’s going to be a way to escape getting gouged this summer both at the pump and in the grocery store.

Just when you think things might be starting to level off, gas prices go all to hell and set things back again.

I find these recipe contests that Dream Dinners holds to be incredibly ironic as well as moronic. It’s ironic that they try to get recipes out of a customer base that admits to being kitchen and cooking hostile. They have no time to make meals for themselves and in many cases they lack the skills, yet Dream Dinners wants them to hand over recipes so they can increase their own menu because it’s cheaper than hiring an actual chef and they fired everyone who held the position previously. Or that person ran away, it’s hard to say sometimes.

The other part I find funny is that almost all the recipes come from someone’s grandmother. It’s not a recipe the person submitting developed, nor is it a recipe they normally prepare for themselves – because they don’t have time. It’s something they wish they could make so they send it off in hopes of winning a few bucks worth of canned food.

It’s sort of sad that the ability to cook, and by that I mean follow directions on a label or from a book, has come to a screeching halt. But yet there are more cooking shows, cookbooks and cooking competitions around than ever before. Interesting how that worked out.

But in the name of recycling and lowering costs, Dream Dinners is cutting costs, getting other people to do their work and is now offering their contest winning recipes as part of their menu. Funny how that works out. If only there were another place you could to go get an almost endless supply of user submitted recipes for free …

Plenty of time has passed so there has to be someone out there who’s become a millionaire while playing the meal assembly game, right? Someone has turned all that sweat and sacrifice into a stockpile of cash and took a walk down easy street to retire at Countryside acres, right? It would be foolish to think that this sort of franchise has been sold without someone being able to change their fortunes for the better, right?

So where are the meal assembly millionaires? Who’s made the big bucks? Who’s now retired because their store was so lucrative? There has to be someone, dozens perhaps, right?

I simply can’t imagine that wouldn’t have happened, but just in case such a scenario didn’t come around, where are all the folks who were able to pull in half a million? Surely someone was easily able to pull in that sort of income from this brilliant money making idea.

A hundred thousand? There HAS to be someone who pocketed that amount, paid off their house and all their debts and has a happy nest egg for retirement?

Now we all know there has to be dozens of people making well over $50,000 a year for themselves generating tons of disposable income for their family. It would be inconceivable to think that sort of thing hasn’t happened.

So where are all of you? Come on out and tell us about the fantastic amounts of money you’ve made off this franchise!